The “write” mindset….

It’s Friday! and I am able to say now that I survived a call to Jury Duty this past week. 

I didn’t put anything about it on the blog because my overactive imagination, that could probably come up with some decent thrillers worthy of a screenplay, was living in fear and dread that I would get put on some kind of controversial case and then I would have let all ten people who read this know I was serving on THAT jury. 

But I escaped unscathed and the closest I got to the courtroom was standing out in the hallway for a few minutes before they sent us back in to the waiting area. 

Whew. 

We were released around lunch time every day and I actually managed to have one of the most productive weeks of my year. Somehow knowing I may have to be sequestered at any moment the following day motivated me to get a lot done with whatever time I had. 

One day as I took a walk, I looked for some new podcast to listen to and stumbled upon a writing coach. Her contributions average ten minutes and that was about my attention span that day, so I listened to several as I made my way around the block. 

Her name is Ann Kroeker and her podcast is http://annkroeker.com/podcasts/

Truth is truth and one of the topics she covered was on busting the fear that you aren’t “good enough.” She talked about how it’s true…we are never going to reach perfection in writing, but we need to have the right (no pun intended) mindset. 

I found her words applicable to our faith walk as well and so I am sharing some of the nuts and bolts of her message. 

She said that we can struggle with a fixed mindset or a growth mindset.

A fixed mindset can cause us to accept the place we feel we were meant to occupy OR it can hold us in a place of moderate success where we have become comfortable. 

But a growth mindset means we take the attitude of an apprentice who will never become a master of the craft – she took this from a quote from Hemingway about writing. 

I certainly see how we can take those words and apply it to our walk of faith. 

It is easy to stop at any point of our journey and say, this must be as far as I can go so I will just camp here and scan the skies and wait for Jesus to come back.

Thoughts that fall into being stuck can look like:

I will never change. I will always be….fill in the blank with your deal.

This situation, person, dynamic in my life, family, workplace, community, church….will never change.

I am not gifted in that area, others do it so much better. Even though I feel a tug on my heart, I don’t have what it takes to serve there, go there, do that.

I can also think of times in my walk when I felt I had come pretty far and had reached good enough so became tempted to just camp out there. 

I have to say, God in His love and mercy has always made sure to interrupt me there and remind me He is not finished with me yet! 

It was encouraging to me as a writer to hear this coach remind me that I need to be always growing if I want to improve at something that matters to me. 

Hearing that growth means I will face new beginnings all the time and with each new effort comes a measure of some learning curve is to be expected. 

So I challenge myself and each of you to look at your walk with Christ and ask if a fixed mindset has sidelined you away from growing more into His image. 

We can become content and comfortable in our discontent or our moderate success. Stuck in a state of complacency with whatever we consider our potential growth in Him to be, we have in effect become the “master” of our spiritual life.

And as we know, always, you and I make lousy masters. 

So how about it?

How about putting on that apprentice hat and stepping out in a new level of faith today by asking God to teach you something new?

2 Peter 1: 5-8

But also for this very reason, giving all diligence, add to your faith virtue, to virtue knowledge, to knowledge self-control, to self-control perseverance, to perseverance godliness, to godliness brotherly kindness, to brotherly kindness love. For if these things are yours and abound, you will be neither barren nor unfruitful in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. NKJV